THE RIGHT SIZE

              What's the right size for a food and beverage company?  As anyone watching the news knows by now, Sunday a ransomware attack on the world's largest meat and poultry processor, JBS, closed 6 processing plants in the U.S.

Cybersecurity company Recorded Future analyst Allan Liska says since May 2020 at least 40 food and beverage companies around the world have suffered ransomware attacks.  How small do you think these outfits were?

             East coast fuel supplies were disrupted recently over the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline.  In that instance, a $4.4 million ransom freed up the flow of fuel.  As companies pay ransom and sophisticated geniuses play havoc with centralized mega-companies, isn't it time to consider decentralized and less technology-dependent suppliers?

             Here at Polyface, we're not even a blip on hacker radar.  We're smaller than a gnat.  Being insignificant is becoming more and more secure in these days of cyber attacks and the Dark Web.   Several years ago when all the big companies prepared for terrorist taints in the food supply, we looked out at our mobile field shelters and miniature processing capacity and knew we didn't need to do anything.

             Our farm would never show up on a malevolent hit list.  Centralized, industrial-scaled places (just one JBS plants employs 3,000 workers) offer havens for infiltrations, whether physical or virtual.  They're big targets and dependent on highly complex, sophisticated systems.  The more nodes in an organization, the easier it is for hackers to penetrate.

             While the "right size" question doesn't have an easy answer, one thing is for certain.  A centralized, techno-sophisticated mega-complex is more vulnerable to Covid, ransomware and other shocks to the system than nimble, people-centric decentralized outfits where the eyes and hands ratio to output is higher.  Provenance matters. 

             Humanity is now in a place where we need to go beyond thinking about what the food on our plate did or does to the frogs, the pollinators, and the earthworms.  We have to think about what it offers as a target to cyber criminals.  Resiliency is not just about ecology; it's about access.  Food and farm authenticity is a big deal, of course, but we need to also consider how big a target the brand has on its back.

             Every food dollar we can circulate in our community, or transfer from big to smaller, is a food dollar that invests in a more secure system.  The notion that big is secure and small is not is completely false.  Being invisible is wonderful.  The more invisible food brands we have, the better.  Rather than streamlining centralization through globalization, we need to create a jumbled crowd of diversity.  That way businesses simply get lost in the confusion, which is also the number one defense used by zebras to deter lions.

             Efficiency only works when everything goes well.  As soon as you have a breakdown like ransomware or Covid, you want effectiveness, not efficiency.  The industrial food and farming complex is arguably efficient, but it's not effective.  Just like gunpowder gave peasants control over castles, computers give disenfranchised malcontents control over modern food castles.

             It's time to realize the fragility of today's castle, to go back to a saner size, a peasant-controlled food system.  More humble.  More rural.  More people oriented.  More heritage based.  Let's leave the industrial complex in droves and rebuild the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker at village scale.

             If you have made an intentional decision to buy something from a smaller outfit recently, what was it?